The article investigates which epistemological considerations justify how religious life fits into the school life, and examines the debate on the participation of religiosity in the education system. I do this, first, by addressing the pedagogical implications of the distinction between public and private as maintained by Richard Rorty and, second, by reconsidering the pluralist metaphysics held by William James as an alternative path to understanding and re-addressing the question of religious life in school (...) class='Hi'>life. The article analyzes how the strict separation of projects of individual self-creation and the public sphere, as defended by Rorty, poses problems in implementing pluralism in democratic societies and their educational institutions. (shrink)

Publisher's description: The Phenomenology of Religious Life presents the text of Heidegger's important 1920621 lectures on religion. First published in 1995 as volume 60 of the Gesamtausgabe, the work reveals a young Heidegger searching for the striking language that eventually formed the mature expression of his thought. The volume consists of the famous lecture course "Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion," a course on "Augustine and Neoplatonism," and notes for a course on "The Philosophical Foundations of Medieval Mysticism" (...) that was never delivered. Heidegger's engagements with Aristotle, St. Paul, Augustine, and Luther give readers a sense of what phenomenology would come to mean in his later works. Here, Heidegger reveals an impressive display of theological knowledge, protecting Christian life experience from Greek philosophy and defending Paul against Nietzsche. The appearance of this first English translation marks a significant event in Heidegger scholarship and affords a unique look into his phenomenology. (shrink)

Cresp, Mary Some months ago while driving I heard an interview with writer Alan Moore on the radio and was so captured by his comments about trends in modern society that I had to pull over to the side of the road and stop to concentrate on what he was saying. I ordered his book, No Straight Lines, and found he presents an inspiring plea for a more human-centric world, more able organisations and more vibrant and equitable economies relevant to (...) the world we live in today. His descriptions so correspond with my experience that, although the changes in Religious Life over the past fifty years are often seen as something that occurred only in church circles, I conclude that they are part of a world-wide search for ways to serve humanity better, to search for meaning in the work people do and to find viable alternatives for the ways that things were done in the past. Because my immediate experience of Religious Life is confined to the Sisters of St Joseph, my comments are framed around that experience. However, through interaction with members of other Congregations, I know their journey parallels that of Josephites in many respects. (shrink)

William James called his classic work, The Varieties of Religious Experience, "a study in human nature." This volume recognizes that a fundamental feature of human nature for James is that we have a conscious and a subconscious mind and that the subconscious mind is deeply implicated in the religious life, especially in conversion and other experiences of spiritual enlightenment. In this volume, Capps addresses religious melancholy, the divided self and discordant personality, religious conversion, the saintly (...) character, and the prayerful consciousness. In addition, the cases of two clergymen--one deeply troubled, the other exemplary of the spiritual person--are also presented. A brief discussion of James's view of religion as the generator of hope concludes this introduction to his insights into the religious life. Given that James was a popular writer in his own day, this book is intended to make his insights accessible to general readers. (shrink)

In a further bit of irony, disaffection with higher education has shifted that peculiar mode of understanding that we call religious into a rather privileged position. To be sure, many of those people who call themselves religious would not engage in this sort of understanding, but that need not detain us here. The central point of these reflections will be an attempt to display a mode of understanding which one might properly call religious. I shall undertake this (...) from a frankly philosophical perspective, but one which remains conscious that philosophic reason also stands in need of illumination. My own conviction holds that attempts of men to delineate the mode of understanding called religious have often been most useful in recalling us to that style of living called philosophic. I think this will prove to be more and more true today, as we try to understand what it means to do philosophy after its demise has been announced and celebrated. (shrink)

Monograph by A. Kolodnyi "Religious Life of Ukraine in the Persons of Its Persons and Researchers" - assessments of its reviewers M. Tkachuk, P.Movchan, A.Yermolenko and P.Yarotsky.

Ukraine has left a prominent mark in world religious history. I will not begin to substantiate my opinion here broadly, but I believe that it was Ukraine that gave way to Eastern Christianity, which ensured the preservation of Orthodoxy as its specific denomination. Moreover, in the thirteenth century, through its resistance to the invasion of the Tatar-Mongols, it preserved the Christian world from the onset of Islam. Through the Vladimir tradition, Ukraine has maintained the desire of the two branches (...) of Christianity to fulfill the covenant of Christ so that they all may be one, and may offer a possible path to this by their Union of Brest. Ukraine gave an example of the survivability of oncational Christianity, because no matter how much our souls died, our Ukrainian Christianity and the Poles with the Vatican and Muscovy did not die from our nation. Ukraine has exemplified poetic, artistic rather than holo-socialized Christianity through its organic union with the popular beliefs of the day before it. Ukraine gave the example of living, unskilled Christianity, which corresponded to the mentality of the Ukrainian as a creator, a hard worker. Ukraine gave in to somewhat feminized Christianity, given the significant role that women played in the lives of their people at the level of household and housewives. (shrink)

The article by M.Murushkin "God in the religious life of the person" shows that in relation to the question of the existence of God all religions are ultimately at the positions of anthropologizing. At the same time, through the state of God, a believer acquires himself. Therefore, any religious system appears not as a picture of the world, but as a picture of a person.

The Internet has become a resource for everyone for everything. It is accordingly now also a source of sermons and much more for pastors of churches in the USA. In consequence, the Internet shapes and alters how pastors and parishioners practice their religion. Because “the medium is the message,” as Marshall McLuhan observed, Internet sermons necessarily reflect and convey something of their Internet source. So, too, the nature and content religious life changes and takes on the characteristics of (...) its new source of inspiration, the Internet. As the dominant expression of technology today, the Internet reveals technology ultimately and in the words of Jacques Ellul as “the real religion of our time.”. (shrink)

For almost three years, Ukraine has the power of Viktor Yanukovych, the power of Donetsk in all its branches. It does not take much time to do some far-reaching conclusions about its activities. It is no longer easy to break or rebuild the two decades of independence, which has been established for two decades of independence, and sometimes it should not be done, because not everything that was possible can be denoted by a minus sign. This can be said about (...) the sphere of religious life of Ukraine, about the freedom of religion established in it, which was recognized by the world until the years of Yushchenko's presidency as one of the most democratic systems of state-church relations. (shrink)

This article develops the concept of experiential careers, drawing theoretical attention to the routinization and de-routinization of specific experiences as they unfold over social career trajectories. Based on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in two religious communities, we compare the social-temporal patterning of religious experience among newly religious Orthodox Jews and converted Muslims in two cities in the United States. In both cases, we find that as newly religious people work to transform their previous bodily habits and (...) take on newly prescribed religious acts, the beginning of their religious careers becomes marked by what practitioners describe as potent religious experiences in situations of religious practice. However, over time, these once novel practices become routinized and religious experiences in these situations diminish, thus provoking actors and institutions in both fields to work to re-enchant religious life. Through this ethnographic comparison, we demonstrate the utility of focusing on experiential careers as a sociological unit of analysis. Doing so allows sociologists to use a non-reductive phenomenological approach to chart the shifting manifestations of experiences people deeply care about, along with the patterned enchantments, disenchantments, and possible re-enchantments these social careers entail. As such, this approach contributes to the analysis of social careers and experiences of “becoming” across both religious and non-religious domains. (shrink)

In this original and controversial book Professor Rawls argues that Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life is the crowning achievement of his sociological endeavour and that since its publication in English in 1915 it has been consistently misunderstood. Rather than a work on primitive religion or the sociology of knowledge, Rawls asserts that it is an attempt by Durkheim to establish a unique epistemological basis for the study of sociology and moral relations. By privileging social practice over (...) beliefs and ideas, it avoids the dilemmas inherent in philosophical approaches to knowledge and morality that are based on individualism and the tendency to privilege beliefs and ideas over practices, both tendencies that dominate western thought. Based on detailed textual analysis of the primary text, this book will be an important and original contribution to contemporary debates on social theory and philosophy. (shrink)

In the period 4800-3600 BC. in the eastern part of the Trypillia area arose "giant settlements" or "megasites" / "mega-settlements" with thousands of buildings. In the central parts of these living conglomerates, scientists found special buildings that were recognized as sanctuaries, sacred complexes or temples. In the late period of the Trypillia culture they disappeared. These religious buildings were built with a focus visible processes of celestial bodies and the laws of cyclic rotation of the Earth in space, and (...) included in their internal filling usually cruciform altars, ritual utensils, troughs with graters for the preparation of ritual bread and numerous other ceremonial and religious artifacts. There were also unique finds, such as gold jewelry and a perforated clay disk with tockins to it from the space of the Nebelivka Temple. The interior and exterior walls of the Trypillia sacral centers were painted with natural colors with a predominance of red. The wood carving for decoration of elements of a skeleton of a construction was investigated also. The first Temples on the European continent show that even at that time there was a cult of architecture. In general, it is clear that such Trypillia objects of religious worship carried encoded astronomical information in symbolic form. The building itself was oriented with regard to worldsides and designed relative to visible celestial bodies. This indicates that the people of Trypillia had a fairly clear worldview, which allowed them to reach the level of understanding the structure and mechanisms of many natural cyclical processes on Earth. Trypillia cosmology united the celestial and terrestrial spheres, and the Temple was the point of contact of the earth with the visible Universe. In his work, the author traces the existing analogies in the structure of construction of Trypillia and sacred complexes of the ancient Middle East and biblical ideas about the Tabernacle and the House of the Lord in the ancient Jews, given the fact, that the Trypillia temple building is known from 4,000 years BC. and several thousand years older than the Middle Eastern counterparts. There are also significant parallels in the construction of temples in the context of Indo-European religious heritage. It is noted that the Temple was not only a metaphysical reflection of the annual cycle with a focus on the points of the equinoxes and solstices, but also had a higher religious function, which consisted in the combination of the terrestrial sphere with the celestial, the connection of man with the mystery of the cosmos. (shrink)

A contemporary philosophy of religion that offers a phenomenology of love. What is to be done at the end of metaphysics? Joeri Schrijvers’s contemporary philosophy of religion takes up this question, originally posed by Reiner Schürmann and central to continental philosophy. The book navigates the work of thinkers who have addressed such metaphysical concerns, including Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jean-Luc Marion, Peter Sloterdijk, Ludwig Binswanger, Jacques Derrida, and more recently John D. Caputo, Mary-Jane Rubenstein, and Martin Hägglund. Notably, (...) Schrijvers engages both those who would deconstruct Christianity and those who remain within this tradition, offering an option that is “between:” between Christianity and atheism, between progressive and conservative, between faith and belief. Ultimately, Schrijvers confronts the end of metaphysics with a phenomenology of love and community, arguing for the radical primacy of togetherness. “Joeri Schrijvers’s book is a tour de force, ranging over a wide spectrum of contemporary thinkers in order to negotiate the distance between religion and religionlessness, God and Godlessness, ontotheology and its overcoming. The result is a nuanced and careful study that repays close study.” — John D. Caputo, Syracuse University “Among the many lusters of Joeri Schrijvers’s Between Faith and Belief is a beautiful recovery of Ludwig Binswanger’s phenomenology of love. Discussion of postmetaphysical theology is arid without philosophically informed and creative talk of love, and Binswanger’s is a voice that has been missing from the conversation for far too long. To put Binswanger into dialogue with Caputo and Nancy, in particular, is at once fascinating and nourishing.” — Kevin Hart, University of Virginia. (shrink)

In the academic year 1920-1921 at the University of Freiburg, Martin Heidegger gave a series of extraordinary lectures on the phenomenological significance of the religious thought of St. Paul and St. Augustine. The publication of these lectures in 1995 settled a long disputed question, the decisive role played by Christian theology in the development of Heidegger’s philosophy. The lectures present a special challenge to readers of Heidegger and theology alike. Experimenting with language and drawing upon a wide range of (...) now obscure authors, Heidegger is finding his way to Being and Time through the labyrinth of his Catholic past and his increasing fascination with Protestant theology. A Companion to Heidegger's Phenomenology of Religious Life is written by an international team of Heidegger specialists. (shrink)

By the late 1830s, John Henry Newman and Edward Bouverie Pusey were discussing the re-introduction of monastic/religious life into the Church of England. Though Newman did not remain in the Church of England long enough to see the full flowering of this effort, his writings as an Anglican theologian reveal that he viewed the monastic/religious life as a central way in which a person could grow in holiness and also a means of fostering the holiness of (...) the Church as a whole. (shrink)

The problem of the correlation between universalism and nationalism has long been the subject of scholarly debate and social harassment by conflicting social groups. To some extent, this is understandable, since a practical conflict between the universal and the national has always existed in any world religion. "This contradiction is historical," L. Filipovich emphasizes, "it emerges with their appearance. Traditionally, the universal and the cosmopolitan in religion have been opposed to the local and ethnic, which is connected with the origin (...) of these phenomena.". (shrink)

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Elementary Forms Of The Religious Life: Translated From The French By Joseph Ward Swain, M.A. This book is a result of an effort made by us towards making a contribution to the preservation and repair of original classic literature. In an attempt to preserve, improve and recreate the original content, we have worked towards: 1. Type-setting & Reformatting: The complete work has been re-designed via professional layout, formatting and type-setting tools to re-create the same edition with rich (...) typography, graphics, high quality images, and table elements, giving our readers the feel of holding a 'fresh and newly' reprinted and/or revised edition, as opposed to other scanned & printed (Optical Character Recognition - OCR) reproductions. 2. Correction of imperfections: As the work was re-created from the scratch, therefore, it was vetted to rectify certain conventional norms with regard to typographical mistakes, hyphenations, punctuations, blurred images, missing content/pages, and/or other related subject matters, upon our consideration. Every attempt was made to rectify the imperfections related to omitted constructs in the original edition via other references. However, a few of such imperfections which could not be rectified due to intentional\unintentional omission of content in the original edition, were inherited and preserved from the original work to maintain the authenticity and construct, relevant to the work. We believe that this work holds historical, cultural and/or intellectual importance in the literary works community, therefore despite the oddities, we accounted the work for print as a part of our continuing effort towards preservation of literary work and our contribution towards the development of the society as a whole, driven by our beliefs. We are grateful to our readers for putting their faith in us and accepting our imperfections with regard to preservation of the historical content. HAPPY READING! (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Aquinas and Dōgen on Entrance into the Religious LifeDouglas K. MikkelsonComparative studies of Christianity and Buddhism have the potential to draw on a wide array of dialogic partners from their respective histories. Two promising candidates are Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) and Dōgen (1200–1253). Aquinas was the angelic doctor whose theological thinking became normative for Roman Catholicism; Dōgen was the prominent Zen master whose influence on the intellectual development of (...) Zen Buddhism is unsurpassed. As it happens, both men "entered into the religious life," and within their respective collected works we see considerable attention to the topic. If we seek to explore what they had to say on the subject, we might benefit by identifying some texts from both thinkers that could serve as focal points for a comparative analysis. Of the massive accumulated writings of both men, the largest are Aquinas's Summa Theologiae and Dōgen's Shōbōgenzō. So it seems logical to start our search by turning our attention to these monumental works.Let us begin with the Summa Theologiae. In the secunda secundae Aquinas addresses a total of 189 topics presented in a question-and-answer format. The first 170 topics concern "themes related to all stations of life"; questions 171–189 explore "details related to particular callings" (2a2ae, Prologus). Question 189, hereinafter identified as 2a2ae q. 189, is specifically devoted to the topic of "entering the religious life" (de ingressu religionis).1When we turn to the Shōbōgenzō, we find a work titled Shukke Kudoku. "Kudoku" means "merit"; "shukke," commonly translated as "leaving home," denotes a person who has renounced home and family in order to enter monastic life. Thus "Shukke Kudoku" can be rendered in English as "The Merit of Entering the Religious Life."2Given that these texts are relatively accessible and substantive presentations of comparable length on issues pertaining to the religious life, they seem to be good focal points for this discussion. At the same time, both thinkers addressed the subject in other venues also, and we can briefly refer to this material as well. But in this article I will primarily concentrate on how a comparative analysis of these two texts illuminates the subject. Defining the discussion in this fashion has the advantage of presenting Aquinas's and Dōgen's views in a particular time and place, leaving aside the more complex issue of how their views may have changed over time. [End Page 109]Let us begin with Aquinas. Aquinas begins 2a2ae q. 189 by outlining ten points of inquiry to be pursued, in effect dividing the question into ten subquestions. The first on the list is "whether those alone should enter religious life who are practiced in keeping the commandments." The commandments he means, of course, are the precepts of the decalogue, the Ten Commandments of Exodus 20:17 and Deut. 5:6–21.Aquinas's standard modus operandi was to first entertain arguments leading to aconclusion opposing his own. In this question he outlines five lines of argument, and in each instance the arguments lead to the assertion that one should not practice the counsels "until one is practiced in keeping the commandments" (nisi prius sit exercitatus in praeceptis); by "counsels" Aquinas means the observance of poverty, chastity, and obedience that are undertaken by those who enter the religious life. As he had explained previously, "The difference between a counsel and a precept lies in this, that a precept implies necessity, while a counsel is left to the choice of the one to whom it is given" (1a2ae q. 108.4).3 Precepts such as the commandments, in other words, enjoin an obligation; counsels are optional.We will discover Aquinas's own answer soon, but we should first note how Aquinas begins his discussion of entrance into the religious life. He begins by posing a question about whether or not one practiced in keeping the commandments should enter the religious life. In the course of answering his own question, he essentially reframes it, seeking to explore whether or not one should practice the counsels before one has become adept at keeping the commandments. For Aquinas, both formulations... (shrink)

State documents on the examination of religious life.

In his latest work on the social consequences of religious commitment, Jay Newman reveals in clear and concise fashion the extent to which competitiveness is an essential feature of religious life. His assessment charts various classical strategies that have been proposed for either eliminating such competitiveness or directing it into appropriate channels. After a detailed philosophical analysis of the nature and value of competition, the author examines competition between denominations and within denominations, and considers religious competition (...) in some of its less obvious forms. In the process of evaluating the methods for curbing religious competition advocated by such thinkers as Spinoza and Lessing, as well as by modern ecumenists, the author points the way to a general approach to religious competition that minimizes destructive religious conflicts without ignoring the positive value of religious competition. (shrink)

The most common tendencies in religious life of the second half of the twentieth century, which I propose to call "convergent processes". The term "convergence" was first used by German scholar Henry Frick in his work Comparative Religion. In seeking to approximate the terminology of the natural sciences and social sciences, begun by DF Schlemmacher, G. Frick used the term in the sense in which it was already used primarily in biology, where this concept characterizes the process of (...) appearance of similarities in the structure and functions in distant the origin of the organisms as a result of their adaptation to the same conditions of existence. The term was used by the researcher to refer to similar processes in different religions. (shrink)

What is happiness? Does life have a meaning? If so, is that meaning available in an ordinary life? The philosopher Zena Hitz confronted these questions head-on when she spent several years living in a Christian religious community. Religious life -- the communal life chosen by monks, nuns, friars, and hermits -- has been a part of global Christianity since earliest times, but many of us struggle to understand what could drive a person to renounce (...) wealth, sex, children, and ambition to live a life of prayer and sacrifice. Hitz's lively and accessible book explores questions about faith, sacrifice, asceticism and happiness through philosophy, stories, and examples from religious life. Drawing on personal experience as well as film, literature, history, biography, and theology, it demystifies an important element of contemporary culture, and provides a picture of human flourishing and happiness which challenges and enriches modern-day life. (shrink)

In this paper I identify and discuss some themes in the thought of Nietzsche and Bergson respectively as these bear upon the wider project to which the paper contributes – the articulation of a philosophical naturalism which offers a non-reductive account of the origin and nature of religion on the basis that the real is 'religious' in essence. Implicitly, an alternative is thereby proposed to the approaches and presuppositions of the 'theological turn' perspective within contemporary 'continental philosophy of religion'. (...) [PROVIDED BY THE AUTHOR]. (shrink)

This article presents Durkheim as a Neo-Kantian social thinker and a source of the theory of emotional contagion. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life is examined as Durkheim’s paradigm case of Neo-Kantianism. He is first considered among the intellectual context of French Neo-Kantianism and its figures Charles Renouvier, Émile Boutroux, and Octave Hamelin, all whom were influential in his formative years. Durkheim’s Neo-Kantianism in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life is then juxtaposed to the Neo-Kantian legal (...) philosophy of Emil Lask and Hans Kelsen. Agued is that Durkheim’s notions of distortion and emotional contagion are his leading contributions to Neo-Kantianism. (shrink)

A complex and controversial social phenomenon is religious and religious life. An important part of it is the preaching of the word of God based on the use of language and writing, on the basis of which sacred books and other written sources for the submission of religious cults are made. The linguistic aspect of the social significance of language and writing as part of the church and religious life of Christians is considered.

The Cham Balamon people in Vietnam are an ethnic group with long religious and cultural traditions, who give a great importance to preserving their own cultural identity through generations. However, in recent years there are many economic, cultural and social changes in the life of the Cham Balamon community. One of the significant changes in the spiritual life of this community is the conversion of belief from Hinduism to Christianity. We think that this is an outstanding problem (...) that needs to be addressed by formal and comprehensive scientific research projects. We have dispatched several research groups to conduct field trips, deep interviews and sociological surveys on the spiritual life of the Cham Balamon community. This paper is the first step of those researches pointing out the problems and challenges to the Cham Balamon community in Ninh Thuan Province, Vietnam. These are cultural and belief conflicts among people in the community or even among family members. However, we would predict that the biggest challenge is the risk of losing cultural identities that the Cham Balamon community is facing today due to religious conversion. (shrink)

The present volume is a translation of Volume 60 of the Collected Edition of Heidegger’s works, Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens, which was first published in 1995 edited by Matthias Jung, Thomas Regehly and Claudius Strube. It consists of three parts: an “approximation of the train of thought and articulation” of a course of lectures Heidegger gave in the winter semester 1920–21 entitled “Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion,” edited by Jung and Regehly; the actual text of his summer semester 1921 (...) course, “Augustine and Neo-Platonism”, edited by Strube; and a “fascicle,” also edited by Strube, “Phenomenology of Religious Life,” which comprises the “first notes” for “The Philosophical Foundations of Medieval Mysticism,” a course scheduled for Winter Semester 1919–20 but not given. Strube suggests that the first two parts may be construed as “the high point, and at the same time the end, of [Heidegger’s] studies in the phenomenology of religion”, which, he says, “constitutes the background against which Heidegger will develop his ‘hermeneutics of facticity’”. (shrink)